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Insight7 min readSeptember 2026

Safe Investments in UAE: Security, Returns and Long Term Statistics

See how Dubai's property market performed through the pandemic and regional conflict, using Dubai Land Department transaction and rental data.

Despite the uncertainty of the global and regional real estate markets, Dubai has proven to be resilient, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing geopolitical tensions. No property market is immune from risks, but Dubai has been maintaining active transactions and rental income during tough times, but the transaction data from the Dubai Land Department(DLD), shows a market that kept functioning when others froze.

What safe actually means in this market

Safe does not mean that property prices never change. When it comes to safety for a long term investor, three points are crucial: legal security of ownership, market transparency, and a history of market activity in good and bad times.
The Dubai Land Department (DLD) registers the property ownership and all transactions are carried out under the Title Deed system. For off-plan properties, escrow accounts provide an additional layer of protection for buyers. These accounts exist under Dubai's rules and regulations to protect buyers and ensure their funds are used only for the intended project.

How Dubai's numbers held up through the pandemic and regional conflict

The clear test of a market's safety is what happens when the world stops travelling and starts worrying about war. Dubai's own reporting shows 2023 and early 2024 as record years for the sector, with transaction volumes and average prices per square metre for both units and villas reaching new highs, built on what the DLD describes as strong investor confidence and rising global demand. That period followed years when most of the world was still absorbing the economic aftershocks of the pandemic, while conflict in the wider region was a live headline. The market did not pause. It grew.

The momentum did not stop at 2024. In the first quarter of 2026, Dubai recorded AED 252 billion in total real estate transactions, a 31% increase year on year, with transaction volume up 6% to 60,303 deals.

Within that, actual investment activity reached 57,744 transactions worth AED 173 billion, a 22% rise in value. The number of active investors grew 8% to 48,448, including 29,312 people investing in Dubai property for the first time. Fifteen thousand five hundred and forty of those investments, worth AED 32 billion, were made by women, the DLD highlights this as an evidence of a broadening investor base rather than a narrow speculative one.

Why the rental market matters more than headline prices

A long term investor cares less about a single quarter's price spike than whether tenants keep paying and keep renewing. Dubai's 2025 rental data answers that directly. Dubai’s rental market continued to show strong growth in 2025 with registered tenancy contracts increased by 6% in volume and 17% in value compared with 2024, reaching 1.38 million contracts worth AED 126.4 billion. New tenancy contracts increased by 10% to more than 513,000, while renewed contracts rose by 3% to more than 514,000. These figures point to continued rental demand as well as strong tenant retention.

In addition, cancelled rental contracts fell by 25% in the first quarter of 2026, further indicating greater stability in Dubai’s rental market. A rental market where renewals are rising and cancellations are falling shows that people are choosing to stay, which is the opposite of what happens when an economy is in genuine distress.

The legal and regulatory scaffolding behind the numbers

None of this growth is driven by geography. Full foreign ownership of mainland companies was introduced under Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2020, later consolidated by Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2021, removing the old requirement for a majority Emirati shareholder in most sectors. That single change allowed foreign investors to hold capital in the UAE directly without the need for a local partner, and its impact can be seen in the FDI numbers. Foreign direct investment inflows to the UAE reached USD 45.6 billion in 2024, up 48.7% from USD 30.7 billion recorded in 2023. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) the UAE also ranked second globally for FDI inflows in 2023.

Fraud protection has also been formalised rather than left to reputation. In 2025 Dubai Police and the DLD signed a memorandum of understanding specifically to raise cybersecurity standards across the real estate sector and to run public awareness campaigns against digital property fraud. The DLD's own framing is that this protects trust and transparency in the market, which is a fair description of what a functioning regulator does when a market is expanding quickly and drawing in first-time investors.

Where the safety claims have limits

None of this makes Dubai property immune to loss. A record price for a square metre in 2024 does not guarantee the same price during a future downturn, and the available research does not forecast future prices. Off-plan investment also carries construction and delivery risk that resale property does not, even with escrow protections in place. Newer developments such as the DLD's real estate tokenisation project, are still at an early stage. The project is now in its second phase, enabling the resale of roughly 7.8 million real estate tokens through a developing secondary market and are explicitly described as a controlled pilot, not an established asset class with a long track record.

But, General safety statistics about the UAE are also not the same as investment statistics. The country’s rankings on personal safety, including its first-place ranking in Gallup’s 2021 Global Law and Order Report for the share of people who feel safe walking alone at night, reflect personal safety, not property returns. These rankings may matter to a buyer or tenant deciding where to live, but they should not be read as a measure of rental yield or capital growth.

What to actually check before treating Dubai property as a long term holding

  • Confirm the developer's escrow account is managed by a trustee approved and audited under RERA rules, not just named on the marketing material
  • Use Dubai REST to check the project's actual completion percentage and escrow account number before relying on a sales timeline
  • Ask any broker for their RERA licence number and verify it against the DLD's public broker list
  • Separate historical transaction data, which the DLD publishes and which is verifiable, from any forward-looking yield promise, which is not government data and it should be checked independently

SILVER OAK PROPERTIES works from the same DLD registration and RERA licensing framework that every legitimate Dubai brokerage operates under. That framework does not remove market risk. It gives an investor a paper trail, a regulator to complain to, and years of published transaction data to check any claim against before committing capital.

Past performance is not necessarily a reliable indicator of future performance. Figures are indicative and not a guarantee of return.

Sources

SOSILVER OAK PROPERTIESDubai real estate advisory

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